But – fortunately! – not deeper in debt. (That’s a reference to an old coal mining song called Sixteen Tons, in case you didn’t know.)

This was a good writing year! To recap:

Filmed to Death was published in the spring.

Photographs and Memories, a serial novella, was published here on the blog in June.

Trapped to Death was published about four weeks ago, and is still in the Top 100 on Amazon’s gay mystery bestseller list! Thanks to you all!

I participated in and “won” NaNoWriMo again, churning out the first draft of Cloistered to Death, which I have now set aside. It’s not scheduled for publication until fall of 2018.

Author Jon Wilson wrote a guest post earlier in the year. If you enjoy gay noir and haven’t read his Cheap as Beasts, please do. It’s fantastic.

About three weeks ago I was delighted to be part of Josh Lanyon’s annual Advent Calendar on her blog, with a mashup story between Jamie Brodie land and Adrien English land. Kate Keegan, Jake Riordan’s ex, joins the fun at West LA Homicide.

So what’s ahead for 2017?

There will be a Valentine’s Day short story called Great Expectations. Stephen Atcheson gets lucky.

Promoted to Death, Jamie Brodie Mystery #14, will be published in late April-early May. Santa Monica College gets embroiled in a promotion scandal, and naturally someone ends up dead.

Someone – I’m looking at you, Lin – made the terrific suggestion that I compile and publish all the short stories. So I’m going to! That anthology will include all the shorts from the blog and the books, and a few that haven’t seen the light of day because I never found a place to use them. It will probably land in August.

Published to Death, JBM #15, will appear in November. I am having a BLAST writing it, and I think you all will love it. Think of everything that could go wrong at a conference of self-published authors… 😀

There will probably be another short story or two along the way, as they come to me.

I hope the coming year is a happy and healthy one for you! Thank you so much for reading!